Friday, December 13, 2013

A third say YES.
Good result.
Probably reasonably representative.
A minority of National voters didn't want the sales.
Nothing to see here.
Waste of time and money.

Preliminary Results of Citizens Initiated Referendum

13 December 2013Media releases

The Electoral Commission has released the preliminary result of the Citizens Initiated Referendum on the question “Do
you support the Government selling up to 49% of Meridian Energy, Mighty
River Power, Genesis Power, Solid Energy and Air New Zealand?”

Radio NZ invited me to participate in Jim Mora's panel discussion on poverty today. I would have loved to address David's Slack's lead-in comments about "intelligent redistribution" and the American experience but that would have used up too much limited time. Starts at 11:00.

This piece, by Peter Saunders, resonated with me and probably will with you:

The politics of empirical truths

In a lecture delivered at Munich University in 1918, the great German sociologist, Max Weber, outlined the qualities
required by anyone considering a career in politics. He ended with this
warning: 'Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he
shall not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or
too base for what he wants to offer.'

That counts me out, then.

Having spent the last 14
years working for public policy think tanks in Australia and Britain, I
have become increasingly frustrated by the 'stupidity and baseness' of
politicians who refuse to acknowledge awkward empirical truths. Even
when, occasionally, a politician summons up the courage to tell people
facts they would rather not hear, he or she immediately comes under
pressure to withdraw their comment, and even apologise for it.

Rod Liddle recently offered one example in the UK edition of The Spectator.
He highlighted an apology issued by the Attorney General, Dominic
Grieve, who had warned of a culture of 'endemic corruption' in certain
Asian countries (notably Pakistan) from which many British ethnic
minorities originate. As Liddle showed, Grieve's warning was fully
justified, for Pakistan is one of the most corrupt countries in the
world, and the UK Electoral Commission has expressed concern about
bribery and vote-buying in certain Pakistani communities in Britain. But
although he was right, Grieve issued a grovelling apology.

This problem of thought
crime and self-censorship is not limited to issues of race and
ethnicity. It extends to discussion of gender and class differences too.

Last week, for example, a
UKIP Member of the European Parliament, Stuart Agnew, was censured by
his own party after claiming that men outnumber women in top jobs partly
because many women choose child-rearing over career building. But he
was right. A 2009 survey found only 12% of British mothers want to work
full-time, and a 2008 report found two-thirds of working mums would
still want to reduce their hours even if improved child care were made
available. In Norway, where mothers can choose between free child care
(if they continue working) or cash payments in lieu (if they raise their
children at home), four-fifths choose to stay home.

Again last week, the
Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, landed in hot water for pointing out
that one reason upward social mobility is not more extensive is that
some people lack the intelligence needed to perform high-level jobs.
Again, he's right - this is something I have been documenting for the last 20 years,
and Boris is the first prominent politician in all that time to
acknowledge it. But in politics, evidence is often irrelevant. Deputy
Prime Minister,

Nick Clegg, attacked
Boris for his 'unpleasant, careless elitism,' Cameron hastily distanced
himself from him, and the BBC and newspaper journalists declared open
season on him for several days afterwards.

Max Weber wouldn't have
been surprised by any of this. He taught that political leadership is
about charisma, the mobilisation of emotion among your followers.
Evidence can be left to faceless bureaucrats. Populist leaders in search
of votes work on sentiment.

If like the CIS, you are
in the business of shifting policy agendas through appeal to evidence
and reason, this emphasis on emotion and sentiment can represent a major
frustration. But as Weber concluded in his Munich lecture: 'Only he who
in the face of all this can say 'In spite of all!' has the calling for
politics.'

Peter Saunders is a Senior Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.

Thursday, December 12, 2013

The government is reportedly reconsidering its opposition to
extending Paid Parental Leave from 14 to 26 weeks. This comes
despite Treasury advice that there would be "minimal benefit
from increasing the length of parental leave."

Welfare commentator Lindsay Mitchell said last year Treasury
analysed who was using paid parental leave, labour market outcomes,
and child health outcomes. It found that, "...there is not a
strong evidence-based argument to support extending the length of
paid parent leave."

Treasury's report states,"...the majority of mothers return
to work when the baby is six months old...". Marginal
benefits to labour market participation and child health and
well-being would therefore be small. Additionally, it notes, "...the
most vulnerable children are likely born into families where
parents are not eligible for paid parental leave...".

In a discussion about improving income adequacy it found that the
arguments are "weak" as "the current access group are
likely to be middle and high income women with stable employment."Of the 32,000 paid parental leave recipients in 2011/12, 58
percent were earning over $40,000; 27 percent were earning over
$60,000.

Treasury also noted a possible negative impact for employers,
particularly small to medium enterprises, as their costs are, "...likely
to be more significant as the length of parental leave increases."
This could give rise to greater discrimination against child-bearing
age females in the labour market.

The implementation of 26 weeks Paid Parental Leave will cost $327
million by 2015/16. Unchanged, the cost would be $176 million in
2015/16. An annual increased expenditure of $151 million for "minimal
benefit" seems highly questionable. The benefit to the
government may lie in gaining electoral favour in 2014.

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Jacinda Ardern:
What will her Government do to address low wage rates in New
Zealand, given that 40 percent of the children living in
poverty are being cared for by adults in paid work but who
are still not earning enough to survive?

1/ Clearly they are surviving.

2/ Being pedantic, around 6 percent of children 'living in poverty' have parents who receive income from benefits and work. 34 percent receive incomes from work alone. But even they are getting more in tax credits etc than they are paying in tax. The government is already addressing low wage rates.

3/ This is the important point.

The 265,000 children (living in households receiving less than 60 percent of the equivalised median household income after housing costs) are not all experiencing hardship (as measured by the Living Standards survey.)

That's because the income data is derived from a sample survey of 3,500 declaring their annual income.

Some families experience a year of low income for a variety of reasons. Unemployment, fewer contracts, a new business start-up, illness, accident, relationship break-up etc. BUT they do have savings and assets to draw on. That is partly why less than half of the 265,000 children 'living in poverty' are actually experiencing hardship.

Ardern's question is designed to shift attention from beneficiary families to working families. But children in working families will (generally) only experience transitory or temporary 'poverty'. They are not affected in the lifelong way that children who spend most of their childhoods in beneficiary families are.

Monday, December 09, 2013

On NewstalkZB earlier this evening talking to Tim Dower about the latest Child Poverty report.

One of the e-mails that Tim read out later was, he said, representative of "a developing theme". It said,

"I assume extreme poverty is being able to afford Sky Sport but not Sky Movies."

I didn't support the line that there is no poverty. I've seen kids in houses where they get sick because of crowding and unhealthy, unhygienic surroundings. Probably the same house has Sky. But the chronic poverty of benefit dependence exists. It's spirit and soul sapping.

Sunday, December 08, 2013

The Children's Commissioner is about to publish an apparently "shocking" report about the increasing number of admissions to hospital for "poverty-related illnesses". The Herald on Sunday editorialises,

"Child poverty should not exist in this country. Blaming parents is pointless."

What or who then should be blamed?

A few weeks back I wrote something about this question. It was published on Breaking Views so apologies if you have already seen it.

Without doubt one of next year's major election issues will be child
poverty. Most of the voices heard on this issue, including the
Children's Commissioner, blame the problem on inadequate wealth
redistribution. Either wages or benefits are too low. Child poverty
is therefore a product of the collective economic system and solving
it becomes the responsibility of government.
I disagree. We are commonly told that approximately 270,000 children
live in homes with incomes that fall below 60 percent of the median
household income. Less focus goes on who these children are and why
their parents are poor.
Around two thirds live in benefit-dependent
homes; of those, around three quarters live with a sole parent. Yes,
there are poor children with working parents but the poverty they
experience tends to be temporary versus chronic. Their parents may
experience short-term unemployment, or fewer working hours,
especially during a recession but poverty is not entrenched. This
scenario is quite different to that experienced by children who are
born onto a benefit and spend much of their childhood there.
More than one in five children in New Zealand will be dependent on a
benefit by the end of their birth year. The percentage improves only
slightly in good economic times and worsens during bad. Because of
the rapidity of the recourse to welfare it can be no surprise to
most of their parents that their child would be born into
economically difficult circumstances.

Over the years these children accumulate in the child poverty
statistics.
As
Treasury observes…"around
1
in 5 children will spend more than half of their first 14 years
in a
household supported by a main benefit."
So what began as a fifth of all children born in any given
year extends out to become at fifth of all children at any given
time.
This phenomenon is the main contributor to New Zealand's much
publicised child poverty problem. The results of this reproductive
pattern of behaviour get discussed broadly, but the behaviour itself is largely
ignored. The misdiagnosis of the child poverty affliction leads to the wrong treatment, or at least
calls for the wrong treatment.
For instance, in 2011 Labour and the Greens both proposed increasing
welfare payments by paying the In Work Tax Credit to
beneficiary parents. This would produce a short-term effect of
increasing incomes but risks drawing more children onto welfare as
the gap between wages and benefits, already very narrow, becomes
non-existent. Internationally, attempting to reduce poverty via the benefit system has been shown
to increase the number of workless households. The solution to child
poverty is not increasing the number of children dependent on the
state.
The current government has taken steps to discourage people from
viewing a sole parent benefit as a legitimate alternative source of
income to employment. It needs to go further by setting clear time
limits and re-framing welfare as emergency assistance. It is
nevertheless on a better track towards reducing child poverty than
any proposed by the potential alternative government.
Trying to achieve economic, and arguably even more important,
emotional security for children through the benefit system is like
trying to get rich playing the pokies. It's never going to happen.

Pageviews last month

Comments policy

About Me

Lindsay Mitchell has been researching and commenting on welfare since 2001. Many of her articles have been published in mainstream media and she has appeared on radio,tv and before select committees discussing issues relating to welfare. Lindsay is also an artist who works under commission and exhibits at Wellington, New Zealand, galleries.